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Minimum Commercial Oven Size

12-06-2006, 12:11 PM

Just wondering what you guys think the minimum recommend size oven for a small commercial operation should be (max. pizza size 15", aprox. 25 -50 pizzas per hour). I want to get some higher volume than a home unit but don't want to wait around 2 hours for the oven to heat either (and spend all my profits on wood).

This is a lot going on here to consider. The good news is that your commercial oven will be hot 24-hours a day, and brought up to pizza heat (around 750?F) either from noon-10PM, or 5-10PM every day. A well-made commercial oven (be careful, as there are good ones and not-so good ones) will hold its temperature at 500?F overnight, so it's easy to bring it back up to heat for cooking each day. And wood consumption is very low.

So, don't let wood consumption impact your decision too much.

For size, I agree that you want to balance the oven size to your requirements for pizza's per hour, or per evening. Here is one good place to look:

It describes pizzas at a time for the various oven sizes. The smaller commercial ovens start at 43"/47" and go all the way up to 73".

For pizzas per hour, the math works roughly like this. If you are cooking 3 minutes pizzas, each spot in an oven can theoretically cook 20 pizzas per hour. Given time spent placing and removing pizzas from the, the reality is probably 10+ pizzas per spot. So a large oven can make 150+ 10"-12" pizzas an hour (or 500+ per evening), and the smaller ovens can make 50+ pizzas an hour. Of course that means you need a team ready to make and turn those pizzas at full speed. In reality, the oven rarely gets in the way.